If I had the time and the university would not complain, I would sit in on a lot of classes. Currently, I am sitting in on Software Engineering thanks to Dr. Wallingford being nice and the fact I have already taken the class. However, a person can learn an unbelievable amount by simply becoming one with the inner sponge. By listening to people more knowledgeable than one’s self, a person gets introduced to new ideas. Unfortunately, it is not enough to simply sit on these new ideas. They have to be put to practice. I do not know where this quote comes from anymore, but it has been a favorite of mine for a long time:
It works in theory, but fails utterly in application.
It is easy to think I understand something only to try to implement and find out I have no clue what I am doing. Other times, I find the original idea is only applicable to specific situations. Sometimes, it is just a bad idea from the start. Pondering an idea is often a good start, but the approach which often has the most success, and is also the most fun for me, is to put the idea to practice. This website is one such example. I get to play with web development ideas as I learn about them. Some of them work. Some of them suck. Sometimes I write about them and people laugh at me. Sometimes I write things, and people agree to the point they talk about it in their classes. The end result is more feedback from which to learn.
Learning is not passive. Many times people are told to be quiet and just listen to lectures. Maybe they are supposed to read some assigned readings. This is what I referred to earlier as becoming one with the inner sponge. It is a good place to start. It is not the finish line. The most knowledgeable experts in any area tend to live, eat, and breathe their interest. Ask a professional tennis player how long they are on a court, hitting a tennis ball, doing physical training, debating nutrition, dealing with media, et cetera. They did not become good simply be sitting on their butts listening to someone tell them how to hit a serve. They got out on the courts and did it.
Eventually those engaged in a field will become the new experts. Then they will share what they have learned with the next generation. It may simply be by communicating with an old friend who happens to be a university professor. It may be at a conference with their peers. It may be via a blog. Regardless, they share the information in some ways. This is how knowledge has been passed down for millennia. The key is to get in on the scoop rather than being left by the wayside.
I realized a couple of days ago I am at the end of the last summer vacation of my life. I will graduate college in December and enter the working world. To get a day off, I will have to wait for a holiday, or use ever precious time off. Fortunately, I have spent this last week making the most of it.
Friday, August 14, was the last day of my summer internship. I had spent the last three summers working in IT for the same company. I changed teams after the first year, but only moved a couple cubicle rows down. In other words, I saw the same floor of coworkers every summer for three years. It was interesting as I was packing up to leave because it hit me that I will never work as a student employee again. Students are always treated a little differently than normal employees. In every job I have had, student employees have been at least mildly protected from some of the mind-numbing tasks every job entails. Instead, I have been allowed to pursue the job tasks that interested me the most. I have also been able to avoid some of the red tape and bureaucracy slowing down some of my other team members. When in doubt, the simple line, “I didn’t know. I am only an intern.” will go a long ways. The trick is using it in a way to benefit the team I worked with everyday. It is seen as taking the initiative to get a job done with other coworkers are being a bit stringent. I was taught this clever technique by one of my leaders my first summer who used to me to contact business associates for information while being unable to give it myself since I did not know any details in which they were interested. There is a possibility I return to the same company to begin my career, but it is still up in the air at this point. Coincidentally, “Broken” by Seether was the last song to play on Pandora before I shut my computer down for the last time. The lyrics can be found here.
My three summer internships meant a summer spent in a city separated from my hometown and college. It was a blast. My sister and her family lived nearby which resulted in lots of summer evenings grilling food and hanging out on their back deck. I had a few friends from high school in the area which I would meet up with on occasion. There was also tennis and videogames. Perhaps the best part of it all was getting out on my own. I am one of those people who gets claustrophobic when I am constantly around people. Moving to a city seems like it would be a problem, but it was easy to tuck away in my apartment. Rather than having to make efforts to get away from everything, the inverse became true. I was making efforts to get out and do some things. Having an evening with nothing to do and being completely free to decide without anyone nagging may be one of the greatest experiences of all time. I have always loved driving across towns late at night in the summer when I am returning home from being out with friends. Being able to roll the windows down, turn up the music, and just cruise is amazing. Having my own apartment in a city was a parallel sensation. Of course, “Good Riddance” by Green Day had to come on the radio as I was driving out of town to move my stuff back to college. As before, the lyrics can be found here.
Then I got a week off before classes started. In that time, I have played nine holes of golf in which I shot my lowest score yet. It was the consistent round I have been looking for all summer. I have played tennis a couple of times. I have gone disc golfing for the first time in years. I have played Rock Band for a handful of hours. I had to get a shower mat to put down on the hardwood floors in my current house to keep the drum set from sliding across the floor. There have been countless hours of playing Call of Duty 4 including a few of the most epic moments yet. This all after two years spent playing the game. According to the statistics in game, I have logged almost two full weeks of my life playing the game. It is one of the greatest of all time in my opinion. I have taken some time to edit some video from the game as well. An afternoon was spent on web development. I have watched the movies Marley and Me, King Arthur, Jaws, and Eddie Izzard’s Dress to Kill. Last night brought several friends around a bonfire in our backyard until the whee hours of the morning. Last, but not least, I have gotten to spend several hours in the evening hanging out with my girlfriend after she has gotten off work. She will be much busier during the semester so it is nice to spend some time now. Something about double majoring, working, and being a collegiate athlete takes up a lot of time during the school year apparently.
All told, it has been a great summer. I have been wanting to write this blog post for over a week now. Funny that I am getting to it on the very last night before classes start. I remember when high school was getting ready to end, I was ready to kick back and just enjoy the end of it. I probably could have done a little better in the activities I participated in, but I doubt I could have enjoyed them much more. While I had a great time, I was ready to move onto something new. I planned my college schedule to have an easy semester to wrap things up. To the point I have two classes, one of which may very well be one of the easiest classes I will take at UNI. The other is just going to be pretty darn cool. Then I will be doing my undergraduate research which should be fun. Finally, I will be sitting on a third class so I might actually know something about the topic, software engineering, since my degree’s emphasis is in it, and the professor who taught it when I took it knew nothing about the matter. Needless to say, I have four months of sports, videogames, football, computers, and friends. It will be a good time.
If you need an update, here is my first blog on grad school. On Friday, I was throwing some general questions to Dr. Wallingford about various things in relation to grad school. He asked who I am looking at. I told him Dr. Cook from UT and Jeremy Siek from CU. It turns out Wallingford knows Dr. Cook personally and has worked with him on a couple different committees in the past. This is very good news for me. Being able to have someone like Wallingford put in a good word for me and make sure my application really gets looked at very easily could be the difference between me being accepted or rejected at a large university like UT. The best thing is Wallingford knows Cook himself. It is not that he simply knows someone on the UT CS faculty. He knows the guy I want as my advisor. Then I hope my track record will speak for itself and get me in.
I am now a senior in college. If you go by credit hours, I will be a super-senior in December. Technically I am 14 months and 2 days from graduating college. What does all this mean? It means I am starting to try to figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life. On Wednesday, the Computer Science Department here at UNI hosted a seminar on grad school. I decided to take off work and check it out.
I had always had the idea of grad school in the back of my head as a potential future possibility (a lot of uncertainty in that phrase, no?). Last month, Dr O’Kane had brought up the GRE’s and the idea of grad school in one of my classes. It got me thinking a little more about the idea. I have really enjoyed college. I feel more comfortable sitting in a classroom than perhaps anywhere else. After all, it is the primary thing I’ve done for the past 16 years of my life. I am also extremely talented at it if I may say so without sounding a bit too presumptuous. I like listening to lectures. I learn a lot from them. I used to jokingly think I should be a student for the rest of my life. I could just continue to take various degrees and quite literally never graduate. These thoughts inevitably lead me to the notion of going to grad school. Let’s not forget that I could carry on the Dr. Sparks title too! 
The seminar turned out to be only the department head (Dr. Wallingford), a professor (Dr. O’Kane), and me. At least I got a lot of personal attention. With me not graduating until after next fall, I got told I have plenty of time to think about things and figure it out. I also have yet to do my undergrad research. I am planning on doing it in my last semester. It was suggested that I do that in a topic related to what I would like to do with my graduate studies should I pursue that particular path. I really don’t know what I would want to study if I did go to grad school. I know it would be in Computer Science. I love history, but I find myself occupying more and more of my time with computer stuff every day. I see the history degree turning into a great hobby when I need a break from computers. It also rounds out my education really well so I am glad I will have the B.A. in history. Seeing as how I didn’t know what I really was interested in yet or where I would want to go, they recommended I just start researching various universities and professors. This would be first and foremost. Once I had a few ideas, I could take the GRE next fall and any other tests if required by my hopeful schools. Then it would come to applications and seeing where I would end up.
I spent a fair amount of time later that evening when I got home looking at universities and their computer science programs. Most really did not reach out and grab my attention. The two that did so far were the Colorado University and the University of Texas. Both have some interesting software research going on. A professor at Texas definitely caught my attention the most. He does some research on web technology which I have yet to fully look into. He also does a lot of research on object-oriented ideas and inheritance. That is the stuff I am really good at and enjoy. I have actually been considering toying with some of those ideas in web applications. Now you see why this Dr. Cook from Texas was so appealing to me. I have been slowly developing ideas about doing my undergrad research on a similar topic. I also want to try it out with some of the websites I build.